Elon Musk Thinks We're All Living in Someone Else's Video Game

"My name... is Elon!"

By
Joe Skrebels

The man behind Tesla Motors, Hyperloop and SpaceX thinks the chance of us not being inside an advanced civilisation's gigantic virtual reality simulation right now is "one in billions".

Speaking at Code Conference 2016, Elon Musk - responding to a question from journalist Josh Topolsky - explained that he's had so many discussions about simulation with his brother that they decided to "ban such conversations if we're ever in a hot tub - because that really kills the magic." Quite.

His proof of being in a video game? Our own video games, and the speed at which they've advanced:

"Forty years ago we had pong. Like, two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were. Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it's getting better every year. Soon we'll have virtual reality, augmented reality.

"If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now. Then you just say, okay, let's imagine it's 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing on the evolutionary scale.

So given that we're clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and those games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such computers or set-top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions."

He is far from the only person to make public their belief in such a situation - Vox's Ezra Klein provides an excellent rundown of philosopher Nick Bostrom's "Are You in a Computer Simulation?" thought experiment, while everything from eXistenZ to Call of Duty have covered the subject in the realm of entertainment.

Unlike most, however, Musk believes being a simulated conscious being is probably a good thing in the wider sense. "Arguably we should hope that that's true," he explained, "because if civilization stops advancing, that may be due to some calamitous event that erases civilization." The point being, basically, that a simulation is unlikely to blow itself up. Hopefully.

Musk is currently enjoying a successful year, with SpaceX's rockets having made multiple safe return landings, and Tesla's unveiling of the Model 3, the affordable electric that has since received over 375,000 pre-orders.

Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK News Editor, and he reckons Musk could have answered far quicker by just pulling out a VHS copy of The Matrix and saying "you seen this? 1999, they made this. There you go, mate." Take part in our reality's virtual reality by exposing yourself to his reality on Twitter.